When I was a kid I had a thing about clowns. My parents would take me to the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey circus every year and once got me this largeformat souvenir book that I treasured. Inside were two spreads I particularly loved: one of all the clowns in their clown gear, and, a few pages later, one of the clowns without their makeup or getups. In each, their positions were rearranged. I pored over these images, attempting to match the paintless faces with the painted, rapt by the transformation.

The star clown was David Larible, an Italian performer who wore a baggy black-and-white-checkered suit with a bright red vest to match his painted nose. I adored him. The way he’d make a fool of himself and the audience members he dragged into the round stage, the confidence of his pantomime, both bossy and self-effacing. He was, perhaps, my first crush.

If it wasn’t Larible, then it was Donald O’Connor, a 1950s triple threat raised in vaudeville. In Singin’ in the Rain, he played Cosmo Brown, the goofy sidekick to Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood, and his “Make ’Em Laugh” scene was my very favorite. There was something deeply intriguing—erotic, even—about the slapstick, the way he made his face look like clay, how he used his body as a prop. “Just slip on a banana peel, the world’s at your feet,” he sang, falling into Lockwood’s lap. “You wiggle till they’re giggling all over the place”—walking into a wood plank— “and then you get a great big custard pie in the face!” He was a clown without the costume.

Recently it seems like everyone’s been crushing on clowns. They show up in music, fashion, art, Saturday Night Live, my local bar, and, like, practically every DIY show. Maybe it’s an extension of hyper-digitalization, a cultural existential crisis, a great big HA! But I like to think it’s more joyful than that—albeit, in its own dark way. Maybe it’s because, deep down, we’re all clowns and always have been.

In 2021, music-theory vlogger Charles Cornell posted a video reacting to “Toilet,” a chaotic 90-second song by grindcore-breakcore-jazz-metal duo Clown Core. “I am frightened and confused and partly aroused what?” is Cornell’s pinned comment. He’s laughing throughout almost the entire video, in turn awed and baffled by the anonymous, creepy, clown-masked, and red-wigged duo’s insane mix of drums, synths, and saxophone.

Clown Core’s first album came out in 2010; a series of unhinged tracks titled “diarrhea inferno welfare burrito,” “i ate a luna bar and my dick fell off,” “circus,” and “brendan fraser” that sound like a true big-top nightmare. (On Twitter, they are still following just one account: @FansofBrendan. I can only imagine that this is a salute, Fraser being an incredible physical comedian, a proper clown—just look to George of the Jungle and Dudley Do-Right.)

It was actually in 2018, when the album Toilet dropped, that the Clown Core obsession truly began. Jazz guys, YouTubers, Redditors, rave kids, and fans as far-flung across the spectrum as you can imagine started uniting to drop jaws and tip deferential hats to the trickster duo. On his channel, Justin Hawkins of the Darkness recently declared that “Clown Core are ancient masters of transcendent music.”

Toilet is a visual album—each of the record’s nine tracks has an accompanying video, filmed entirely (drums, sax, synths, and all) inside a Porta-Potti. When they death-metal grumble into the mic incoherently on “Hell,” the subtitles read, “ALL OF MY TURDS GO STRAIGHT TO HELF/A SMALL GIFT FOR THE DARKNESS ITSELF,” before a jazzy respite. No words are actually articulated, but that’s pure clown for you—clowns don’t speak, they mime. They caricature, they emote. There’s a downy honk of a horn during the song “Toilet,” bookending their scream that “CALZONE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED,” and then the saxophonist places his dick on his keyboard—a third member—and proceeds to absolutely rip. During “Truth and Life,” Clown Core’s bouncing-ball heads bop above the words “I LIKE WAKING UP DURING SURGERY/ITS THE ONLY WAY I CAN CUM,” before a long beep and a screen of binary code that translates to “humanity must create art in some form to fulfill its purpose and people around you need more love than you realize.” The contrast of the messages is clowning at its finest. Subsequently, a whole community of vloggers formed to break down this music, “Hell” racked up views—at time of writing this, it’s at 4.7 million—and in 2023, Clown Core embarked on a nearly sold-out club tour. By the time their 2020 visual album Van came out, speculation had grown over the identities of the two Clown Core members. But I don’t particularly care and it really doesn’t matter. It’s true clowning. In Van, Clown Core are driven around by someone in a black hood, drummer in the back, saxophonist shotgun, the pair wearing the same navy jumpsuits, red wigs, and masks. It’s another delicious, banging farce—this time we see the drummer piss out of the van; they crash lightly into a pole and a dick-shaped airbag inflates in the driver’s face. During “keyboard,” the drummer takes a dump on a keyboard. The turd stays there—another third member of the band. On the next track, “bologna penis,” the duo are all grainy, standing on a hill, reminiscent of the 2016 scary clown sightings.

Clown Core are special as fuck, but it’s not as though they don’t have precedent. Frank Zappa, Danny Elfman, Tom Waits, and ska-ish experimental ’90s band Mr. Bungle (who once covered Mr. Rogers’ “The Clown in Me”) have all evoked the clownish in their music. Whether through dark humor, trickster performance, circus sounds, or all of the above, clowning has long been part of rock ’n’ roll. Honkhonk! Slipknot's Shawn Crahan has made his way through all kinds of clown masks: from vintage German, to Killer Klowns From Outer Space, to gimp, to his recent mirrorball. There are a zillion songs about clowns: NOFX’s “Cokie the Clown,” XTC’s “Dear Madam Barnum,” Placebo’s “Pierrot the Clown,” to name a few. Obviously, Insane Clown Posse and their antifascist Juggalos must be mentioned. “Bitch, I’m clown drippin’!” The whole shtick is deeply related—outcasts, carousers, inciters, disrupters, absurdists, players, revealers of life’s silliness, its irrationality. Circus marches are called screamers. What could be more apt?

“Clowning is more than the mask,” artist Alex Millan explains. A performer and photographer, Millan ran away from their home of Puerto Rico to join a clown theater troupe at 16. After clowning full-time for three years, Millan moved to New York and started a surrealist comedy night called The Last Ha. That evolved into the Tony Tulips show, which Millan hosts at community art spaces like Brooklyn’s Rubulad and L.A.’s Church of Fun. It’s a stand-up talk show, usually with a band—all in clown gear—and “Eric Andre vibes.” (Andre, a surrealist prankster comedian, had his own clown music thing, speaking of. His Ronald McDonald-esque alias Blarf fronted a plunderphonic jazznoise band that started at Berklee and once performed with Thundercat and DOMi & JD BECK.)

For Millan, Tulips is an alter ego—in the superhero way. “If I’m in my clown mode, I'm not Alex all of a sudden,” they explain, after citing Jim Carrey, Robin Williams, and Andy Kaufman as influences. “1 can be a very sad person. The thing is that a sad clown is only funny because the clown is allowing you to laugh at their sadness. It’s a mirror that is created for you—if you’ve been in that position and you’ve fallen down and people have laughed at you, it’s this healing thing.”

When everything was shut down in 2020, Millan moved the performance inside and started hosting sexy clown parties, calling the project Piel de Yaso—Spanish shorthand for “clown skin.” Friends and followers of Tony Tulips are invited over to don clown makeup, get raunchy, and be photographed with and by Millan. “Sex in all of its forms is funny,” Millan says. “There’s liquids and sweat and crazy faces and all this movement. Sex is a ridiculous thing that we do. And because of it being taboo, it’s this silent thing. Adding a clown to the mix makes it all the more absurd. ” Early pantomimes were known to be erotic as well as filthy, after all.

After telling two friends about sex clowning, they both told me they’d like to fuck a clown one day: “Squirting flower, honking nose, big feet. ”

A recent tweet: “she [clown nose honk] on my [slide whistle] until i [gag flower that squirts].”

A meme I found on Reddit: “Clown College GF: ’HONK HONK® I have a leftover cream pie from pie-throwing class.. .maybe we could split it? Oh.. .you want to give me a... c-cream-pie instead...? Anything for you...’’HONK” You’re getting me so wet, anon.. .’’flower on shirt spurts out water*” “Everybody has a clown in them,” Millan says.

The “aesthetic” or “look” dubbed clowncore started blowing up online around 2018, too, not long after the It reboot came out. However, I am not concerned here with the sweeter, fashion-y side that’s been heavily aggregated recently. Bright colors, big ruffle collars, and wide-leg pants are all well and good, but the trend pieces are missing the bawdy irreverence, the orphic nerve at the heart of it. As my wise editors put it: “It’s wrong.” And as artist Xandra/ Xander Louvre, who makes music and performance art as Saturn Lavender—often in clown makeup—remarked astutely, “I don’t believe being a clown is high fashion or designer. That feels like they’re stealing from us folks in the rave/punk/noise scene. The designers make it too pretty when it should be DIY to the max. Rave and punk kids have been doing it right since the beginning, and the real ones will be clowns or fools till the end of time.”

Exactly. I’m talking about all the playlists titled CLOWNCORE that feature, along with Clown Core the band, hyperpop and breakcore artists like 100 gees, Black Dresses, Ashnikko, Slayyyter, Poppy, Jack Stauber’s Micropop, and Nero’s Day at Disneyland. I’m talking about the fact that hyperpop is clowning; that if you go to a breakcore gig you might see a clown; that this is clown music, and I fucking love it.

Clowncore, British accordion player clown Ed Cox told Clash in 2008, is a reflection of what’s happening in the rave scene, “but with a red nose scribbled over the top.” Apparently, it’s been a super-micro-genre for years now. “After having my parents and friends constantly make fun of the breakcore I listen to as ‘clown music’ I finally understand what they’re talking about,” a user wrote on the Bandcamp page for Cox’s 2010 album, CLOWNCORE. There’s “Let’s Be Silly,” fast-paced and rave-y; “Lonely Clown,” which could soundtrack an updated Pagliacci; twisted kids’-show-esque, ska-tinged “Clown’s Funeral”; and “Speckly Freckles,” which sounds like The Big Comfy Couch on DMT. It makes me feel a little bit like they are coming to take me away. Ha ha!

Whereas Alex Millan becomes their character Tony Tulips, visual artist and musician Jessie Edelstein feels the opposite. The foundation of Edelstein’s work is what she calls “face production,” a hybrid physical-visual artistry that came out of her drag party background. While she doesn’t identify with clowns necessarily, she does consistently paint her nose red. “I like how it looks as a visual marker,” she tells me. “People see the clown nose and they’re like, ‘Oh, she’s just a little clown.’” But Edelstein is insistent that, if one were to label her anything, she’s a club kid. At first Edelstein created a character called Virgo Couture. But after a while she started to feel that, because the character wasn’t real, she was separating her art from herself. “1 wanted to join them together,” she explains. “A lot of the time people think facial augmentation comes from the outside in. But I think it comes from the inside out.” It's a kind of manifestation of Millan’s theory that everyone has a clown in them.

More than anything, Edelstein is inspired by musicians who are fully conceptual artists, both visually and sonically. Like Scottish hyperpop pioneer SOPHIE. The track “Faceshopping,” which came out in 2018, just a few months before Toilet and right around the time Edelstein started painting her face, was massive for her. For the past few years now, after moving to L.A., Edelstein’s been making music herself, under the name Jessie.mp3. It’s distorted pop music, very in the sonic world of the record label PC Music and not too far off from breakcore artist and fellow New Yorker LustSickPuppy—or even Clown Core the band. In the video for “Digitalgurl,” Edelstein sings, distorted, “They call me fake/But I know I’m not/I’m from the void because I’m hot.” She’s in pink-and-blue colorblock makeup with windows painted on top, in front of moving pictures of her own face with super-thin eyebrows and dotted with smiley faces. It’s carnival-esque at the very least—and low-key social theory about identity in a cybernated world. (Apropos: Face paint has been used to dodge facial identification—an extension of a WWI-era technique called “dazzle camouflage.” Also called “razzle dazzle,” is that camp or what?)

I could theorize endlessly about why clowns are in the cultural Zeitgeist right now. Society has gone to shit, pandemic, alienation, late capitalism, yada yada. Honestly, clowns have always been the Zeitgeist. Clowns are inherently subversive. They’re an expression of the way we cope under capitalist and fascist systems. Clowning, writes psychoanalyst and clown Michael Bala, “serves the individual’s and the culture’s need to face, survive, and to throw off what can feel like the deadening cloak of our existential feelings of humiliation.”

The oldest clowns have been traced back to 4,500 years ago, in Egypt and China, where they served in royal courts. There were clowns who had socioreligious and ritual roles. There were clowns in the form of the trickster or fool figure in ancient Greek and Roman theater. The earliest clowns as we know them now came from commedia dell’arte, 16thto 18th-century Italian theater that gave us Pierrot, the sad, and Harlequin, the mischievous. Shakespeare’s fools—Falstaff, Nick Bottom, the Clowns in Othello and Titus Andronicus—tend not only to make dirty, often scatological jokes, but to point directly at the absurdities of the plays’ action and the characters’ misunderstandings. “The cleverest character in comedy is the clown, for he who would make people take him for a fool, must not be one,” said Don Quixote. Tarot’s Fool card is unnumbered—or zero—making it ambiguous, either the lowest or the highest card. The Fool is shown standing on a precipice, about to either fall or take a leap of faith. The clown is both dom and sub. The clown is sex and sadness, fear and joy, turds on keyboards and inflatable dicks and art and pain and pleasure. Honk! Wiggles and giggles and a pie in the face.

“Clown culture belongs to the outcasts,” Louvre notes. “[The current trend is] linked to the rave/punk scene, who are also outcasts in some way. When we see another as a clown freak, we feel liberated that we aren’t alone and share this wavelength that we can be safe and freaks together. Being a clown, punk, or raver and seeing another who looks like us feels like finding a home in one another since a lot of us don’t have that from the beginning.”

It’s no coincidence that drag and clowning are linked. Clowns are not only anti-capitalist, they’re queer. Historically, clowns have blurred gender lines and subverted conceptions of masculinity. San Diego kink and drag artist Clussy created his character after being exposed to the drag scene, where he encountered drag monsters and drag clowns. Usually in full white face paint, sometimes with horns, a vampire brow, or a Who (from Whoville) nose, Clussy was intrigued by the melding of the “typical glam aspects of drag” with “horror and filth,” he says, as well as a desire to “break loose from the typical forms of beauty”—and thus his clown dom was born. He was inspired, too, by historical black mimes and silent gospels like Disciples of Mime. Both “the emotion portrayed without any words,” he says, as well as the narrative told through movement, and the reclaiming of minstrel-era blackface. “Me in whiteface is a riot in its own.”

Clussy started out getting booked for punk shows “in random little warehouses” and evolved his performance into fetish. “There’s something mysterious [about clowns],” he says, that gives them an erotic allure. And it’s the fear, too: “I’ve had a lot of people tell me I helped them clear their fear of clowns. I can be a fearful clown when I’m domming in my clown persona. But it gives them a different relationship to clowns. They’re like, This can be hot, this can be consensual.’”

Thanks to Clussy, I now know about the existence of a porn star named Gibby the Clown, who fucks solely in a tongue-out clown mask and a curly rainbow wig.

“Is Clowncore a kink now?” a Reddit user asked in 2020, with a screenshot of a Tumblr post that reads, “The fact that makeup is considered to be ‘mature’ and ‘sexualized’ implies that being a clown or mime is the sluttiest job out there.”

“Everybody has a clown fetish,” says Clussy. “And if they don’t, we’re gonna give them one.”